Steve - Catches Up

So... haven't written in here in a while! I'm home for the week, and so it's a lot quieter, and so in turn this allows me to catch up with some reflective writing regarding the themes and thoughts of the past five weeks of university. I'll be writing a small series of essays or posts on these, of which this is the first.

Guerilla Advertising, or On Falling Out With A Product.

Determined, it seems, to bring me fully to terms and reinforce my StraightEdger status, I've had a falling out with Red Bull. One part of this is my giving up of caffeine, which will be covered in a later post, but the part of relevance here is my clash with them on advertising.

One morning I wake up, have a shower, walk to the kitchen... and find a rather large poster put up on the board... it's an advertisement for Red Bull. The bulk of the poster is taken up by a large can of Red Bull, and the text below says "Can You Make Music?" or something similar. I feel flecks of annoyance furl up in my head, but it's early and I'm fairly used to it, so I let it be for that moment, and make my breakfast. After eating this I trek to the cafeteria to collect my post. I walk back, and spot on the door another poster. This one looks fairly hand-made, done in markers on squared paper, saying... "Can You Make Music?".

Intrigued at the similarity, I examine the poster further, there's a web address you can probably find if you want to look (but I won't be linking here, friends), and a few enigmatic statements on not very much (presumably designed to whet your curiosity). I discover the name of the campaign, Red Bull Can Make Music. Discovering that the paper is glossy and lithographed, not hand-made and edgy as it tries to pretend, the flecks of anger ignite.

Not to be melodramatic, but it wasn't without a sense of purpose that I took the poster down. A simple act, perhaps, but in an environment so chock full of branding and advertisement, not an unmomentous one.

And I can't pretend it didn't fill me with a certain delight and empowerment tearing down the other one on the corkboard, or the three downstairs, or the five or so others around campus.

It didn't start out so much as a calculated anti-advertising act, it was more a sense of outrage (a not ignoble emotion). My own house! My own accommodation! Without permission (more on this later), without any sense of ethics or even politeness. Add to this the pretentious nature of the 'hand-made' posters, the fact that a student was getting paid to put them up, and the juxtaposition of art school and advertising, and I was fairly livid.

It didn't stop at the posters either. My mind hearkened back to a story I'd been told where a can of the energy drink had been duck taped to every chair in a classroom. Wasn't quite sure how I felt about this, I suppose product give-aways are okay? Anyway, that was the better side.

The other side I discovered one morning on the way to class, about a week since the posters had appeared. I walked out to find an odd sprinkling of graffiti around. Yes, that's right, the so called Red Bull Fairy had used graffiti to spread his advertising message. The stencil, which I saw probably 8 times on the way to class that morning (not a long walk, less than 5 minutes), consisted of the Red Bull logo and two lines of text saying "Can You Make Music?" in suitably urban lettering.

Now, you could write a book on cultural appropriation by big business. It's one of the most insidious techniques used by marketeers while simultaneously being the most irritating. Graffiti was meant to be a way for people to reclaim their environment, for people to write their own message, where it can be heard as loud or louder than corporate advertising. It was meant to be revolutionary.

So when Red Bull comes into my art college, pays a student to appropriate a previously meaningful art form in total contrast to the movements ideals, and plasters their logo all over my fucking neighbourhood... I become rather upset.

And sadly enough, that's pretty much where it stopped. I'm left in the awkward position of not being able to do much about the graffiti, not knowing what he used (other than that it doesn't come off with water) I can't go over it without the risk of mine being more permanent than whatever he used.

I did have a bit of a debate with the guy, who revealed himself when I was talking about taking down the posters in his presence, but I wasn't very articulate at the time, and so didn't get very far. Plus, having two of them there and no back-up of my own didn't particularly help. Ended in a stalemate, that one. He wanted to convince me to stop taking them down, and I wanted to explain/justify my decision. Neither of us got particularly far.

I will keep you posted on events to come... I hope there's something I can get my teeth into...